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Smoking pot has ill effects on adolescents

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Friday August 22, 2014 5:25 AM

I am a physician who is board certified in both pediatrics and addiction medicine. Between 1985
and 2009, I worked with several thousand substance-abusing adolescents. During that time, I became
alarmed about the effects that smoking marijuana has on young people.

Parents would bring their marijuana-smoking adolescents to our treatment program complaining
that their children were doing poorly in school, were emotionally drifting away from their families
and had little motivation to learn.

The science now has caught up with what we were seeing clinically. Dr. Robert DuPont, an
addiction psychiatrist, has stated that adolescents who regularly smoke marijuana are putting their
lives on a downward trajectory that will lead them to become, at best, chronic underachievers. Dr.
Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, has shown that smoking marijuana
affects memory and cognition and consequently limits what a young person can achieve.

The human brain is still developing into a person’s early 20s. If the developing brain is
insulted with THC, the active ingredient of marijuana, is there a limit on what a person can
become? Many of us think so.

Colorado has legalized marijuana and has allowed itself to become a grand social experiment.
Because marijuana was legalized, many people think that means it is safe. Now young people in
Colorado are smoking marijuana in record numbers. We don’t know yet what will happen to these young
people.

I hope the people of Ohio will come to understand that marijuana is a dangerous, addictive drug
that can drain a person’s life spark and inspiration.

Any young person who regularly smokes marijuana is not giving himself a fair chance at life.

We cannot allow marijuana to become legalized in Ohio. The futures of our young may hang in the
balance.